A political analyst says the United States is responsible for the genocide of the minority Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, Press TV reports.

“The United States of America bears responsibility for this genocide, since the US has been rewarding the Myanmar regime with ever-closer political and economic ties during recent months of accelerating atrocities,” Kevin Barrett wrote in an article published on Press TV Website.ll

I am writing to every contact listed at Buddhanet.info's American
Buddhist Directory to ask:
Are you aware of the ongoing genocide in Myanmar (Burma) - a
genocide that is being committed in the name of Buddhism?

And did you know that the United States of America bears
responsibility for this genocide, since the US has been rewarding the
Myanmar regime with ever-closer political and economic ties during
recent months of accelerating atrocities?

As American Buddhists, you are in a position to help stop this
genocide, by pressuring the US and Myanmar governments as well as
international human rights organizations. Your visible participation
in the campaign to save the Rohingya people from extermination by
murderous Buddhist fanatics will not only help draw the world's
attention to this horrific situation, but also help restore the image
of Buddhism as a religion of compassion.

The facts about the genocide in Myanmar are not in dispute. The
fanatical Buddhist nationalists, who unfortunately represent a large
segment of the roughly 60 million Buddhists in Myanmar, admit that
they are trying to uproot and exterminate the roughly one million
Muslim Rohingya from land that the Rohingya have lived on for
centuries.

Here is what a typical genocidal Buddhist fanatic from Myanmar
wrote in a comment on a Wall
Street Journal article:

"Burma is Buddhist nation created for the 135 Tibeto-Burman
tribes. People do not get citizenship just because born there or
illegally lived there for centuries. Please do not interfere with the
law and internal affairs of Burma just as you do not like other
nations to poke their nose in your internal affairs."

"People do not get citizenship just because born there
or illegally lived there for centuries." This statement,
which aptly sums up the official policy of the Burmese regime, could
get the person who made it, and the government that follows it,
hanged for crimes against humanity. OBVIOUSLY being born in a modern
nation to a family that has been there for centuries automatically
confers citizenship. And OBVIOUSLY any modern nation that denies
citizenship to such people, burns their homes and communities, and
murders them en masse, with the aim of removing them from the nation
of their birth, is committing the internationally-recognized crime of
genocide.

In recent weeks, many thousands of homes, and more than 20
mosques, have been burned by murderous Buddhist mobs, backed by
national security forces, in the Arakan state of Myanmar. Estimates
of the number of Rohingya Muslims murdered, whether directly or by
drowning in the Naf river as they flee the killers, range from the
thousands to the tens of thousands. Every one of the more than 500
mosques in Arakan has been taken over by the genocidal regime's
security forces and shut down, and they are being demolished
one-by-one. (This happened during the holy month of Ramadan, when
Muslims are supposed to spend as much time as possible in a mosque.)

Muslims have been living in Burma since roughly 800 c.e. - that
is, nearly for as long as the religion of Islam has existed. And
Arakan has been a Muslim region, ruled by Muslim kings and/or
populated by Bengali Muslims, since 1430. The most notable population
increase of Muslims in Arakan took place in the 1600s. The idea that
the Rohingya people are somehow "recent immigrants" to the
region is clinically insane - a symptom of the larger insanity known
as nationalist fanaticism.

Both Buddhism and Islam are universalist religions: They proclaim
truths that are valid for all people, indeed for all of existence.
And the core truth that both religions proclaim is the primacy of
compassion. In Buddhism, a central feature of the Buddha nature is
compassion for all beings. If one were to choose a single hallmark of
a successful advanced practitioner of Buddhism, it would be a
highly-developed sense of compassion.

Whatever has happened to the Myanmar Buddhists' compassion for
their fellow citizens who happen to be born as Rohingyas?

Islam, too, views compassion as a central reality of creation.
Muslim theologians, like the more advanced Christian and Jewish
religious thinkers, view God as ineffable; but the primary and
overriding tangible characteristic of God in Islam (with the
proviso that no tangible characteristics fully express the reality of
the one ineffable God) is rahma, or compassion. The two
adjectives Muslims use the most to "describe" God are
ar-rahman ar-rahim, usually translated as "the merciful,
the compassionate." (The root of rahma and its cognates
derives from the word for "womb," suggesting that this
"compassion" has something in common with the nurturing,
all-embracing, unconditional love that mothers feel for their
children.)

Additionally, both Buddhism and Islam teach us to transcend or
even annihilate the (tribal) ego. Buddhism offers a set of teachings
that take its practitioners beyond the ego, which is the source of
the endless desire that is the cause of the pervasive suffering or
disappointment that characterizes ordinary human existence. Likewise,
Islam teaches its serious practitioners to annihilate the "ego
that desires evil" through absolute submission to God. Each
religion offers a very similar cure for the unhappiness of the
ordinary human condition.

The kind of chest-thumping egotistical nationalism that proclaims
"I am a Buddhist, my heroic nation is Buddhist, I am so much
better than those non-Buddhists that I must kill them or exile them"
is about as far from the compassionate teachings of the Buddha as it
is possible to get. Likewise, extremist Muslims who proclaim that
their narrow version of Islam is the only truth, and that everyone
who disagrees should be killed, are equally far from the universal,
all-compassionate message proclaimed by God through the Prophet
Muhammad (peace upon him).

Muslims and Buddhists ought to unite against ego-driven
nationalist fanaticism, which is an affront to both religious
traditions. A good starting point would be joining forces against the
genocide in Myanmar. Below are some suggestions for action.

Write and call Myanmar's
government contacts pointing out that every modern nation agrees
that anyone born inside a nation, whose parents and ancestors also
lived on that territory, is automatically a citizen of that nation
and must be protected by that nation's government.